Systems and methods herein generally relate to machines having print engines such as printers and/or copier devices and, more particularly, to specifying print and finishing options when printing from a mobile device.
Conventional digital reprographic systems receive electronic image(s), which are passed to an image-processing unit. The image-processing unit may be a combination of software and hardware elements that accepts the electronic images from different sources and performs operations needed to convert the images to the format compatible with the output path of the digital reprographic system.
Mobile users may want to specify/override print options (copies, orientation, page size, color/b&w, etc.) for documents from a mobile device. Current conversion services may attempt to insert and/or preserve print ticket operations or bind print tickets to print jobs using cloud servers and or other hosted services. These may not match what is necessary/desired to print to a particular target image output device.
For example, in the current art, one method of printing from mobile devices involves using a conversion service to convert an electronic document into a printable format and either returning that document to the mobile device, or printing it from the conversion service itself. Using a conversion service allows the mobile user to print many types of documents to many types of printing devices without having to have specialized print drivers developed for and installed on the mobile device. These conversion services may attempt to insert and/or preserve print ticket operations or bind the print ticket to the print jobs using cloud servers and/or other hosted services. In the case of having the print service send the document directly to the printing device, there may barriers to accessing the desired printing device (firewalls, etc.).
None of these methods is sufficient when the mobile application requires a set of options that are supported by the target printing device, but are not a subset of the options provided by the aforementioned services. Additionally, conversion and off-line storage services often do not have information about the specific printing devices targeted by the mobile user, and may not be able to provide all options, or the correct syntax and format for the print ticket.